The 35 objects in "Medieval and Renaissance Treasures from the Victoria and Albert Museum," new at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, are as various and assorted as only treasure can be, ranging in date from 300 to 1600 AD and in origin from imperial Byzantine workshops in Constantinople to the famed enamel workshops in Limoges, France.

Gold, silver, ivory, pearls, garnets, emeralds and rock crystal are among the materials list for this show, and that makes sense because they are all, taken together, loot. The temptation to write about them in pirate talk is all but overwhelming -- Aaarrrrr!

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London holds the greatest collection of decorative arts in Europe, and we owe this show to the fact that the museum, due to reopen in 2009, is undergoing a major renovation.

There are fabulous things here, like a 12th-century reliquary casket from Limoges for the bones of St. Thomas Becket, made of gilt copper and champleve enamel; a pair of seventh-century gold brooches inlaid with garnets in the knotty, Anglo-Saxon style; and extraordinary carved ivories, a particular specialty of the museum.

For the most part small -- no ivory can be bigger than an elephant's tusk, anyway -- and exquisite, most of the objects here came to England not through direct conquest but through acquisition at two key moments in history.

The first was really more of a long process than a moment, a sustained pursuit begun after the breakup of the monastery treasuries in the 16th century under Henry VIII and the subsequent countrywide defenestration of church holdings as England became iconoclastically Protestant. Much of the gorgeous and extremely precious material liberated from the churches was melted down or simply destroyed, but some local families hid fragments of enamel work or stained glass or goldsmithing out of reverence for the passing faith. Subsequently many of these objects were picked up by the Kensington Museum, whose holdings formed the core of the Victoria and Albert when it was established during Queen Victoria's reign.

The second event was the French Revolution and Napoleon's rise and fall, which took place at the very beginning of Victoria's years on the throne. Revolutionary zeal urged that church treasuries in France and Germany be broken up and sold to the highest bidder, to benefit state coffers. This last event occurred just as interest in the Middle Ages was growing, particularly in England, and when the British empire was at the height of its power, prestige and wealth, all of which made acquisition easier.

We say all this not to cast aspersions on how the Victoria and Albert came by its treasures, since there is a very valid argument that if the museum had not bought these things, they would have been lost or melted down. It is more to explain the diverse nature of this show, which is in every way true to the nature of treasure.

Perhaps the artistic highlights of the show are two modest carvings, a fragment of a crucified Christ carved from ivory by Giovanni Pisano around 1300, and a fantastic figure of Mary and Child carved from boxwood by Nuremberger Veit Stoss between 1500 and 1505. The Pisano, since it is only an armless and legless fragment that consequently focuses our attention on the expressively emaciated face of Christ, makes a strong appeal to our modern tastes, not least because of the twisting hourglass shape of Jesus' tortured torso. But Stoss' figurine, still perfectly preserved, is a marvel of flying drapery and pliant flesh (the way the fingers on the Virgin's left hand sink into the Child's baby-fat legs). It, too, is marked by marvelous abstractions, in the drapery but also Mary's long tresses down her back and even the little man-in-the-moon at her feet.

There is also a wonderful bronze putto (child-angel) carrying a fish by Donatello (probably executed 1435-40) originally conceived as a wall fountain. We should certainly mention two gilded figurines of prophets by Herbert Gerhard from 1581-4, cast for an altar memorial to one of the richest bankers of any age, Christoph Fugger (1520-79); and a bronze nude of Atropos by Pier Jacopo Alari-Bonacolsi (c. 1500).

The corker is the Forster Codex, one of Leonardo's working notebooks, this one devoted largely to mathematics (its singular focus has often made scholars wonder if it was a draft for publication). Smaller than the palm of your hand but filled with detailed drawings (it is open to a page showing how to work out the mass of a diminishing dodecahedron, maybe the finial atop a dome), it is like anything touched by Leonardo -- infinitely alluring and mysterious.

There are other reliquaries, decorated vessels, gilded caskets and even two intricately carved tablemen from a 12th-century backgammon game here, nearly all of them ravishing and rare.

The feeling you're left with is the incredible richness of Europe's attic -- that, and the irresistible appeal of booty. Yo ho ho. ...